Collaborative storytelling experiences in social media: Influence of peer-assistance mechanisms

Collaborative storytelling activities in social media environments are generally developed in a linear way in which all participants collaborate on a shared story as it is passed from one to another in a relay form. Difficulties with this linear approach arise when collecting the contributions of participants in to a coherent story. This study proposes a hypermedia approach to enable students to integrate the episodes of others to develop different branches of stories. Since these linear and nonlinear approaches facilitate students in developing stories in quite a different manner, students’ perceptions of linear and hypermedia approaches differ in their collaboration mechanisms, which may in turn affect positive inter-dependence and ultimate success in the collaborative storytelling. The results of an empirical study show that the performance of students in the hypermedia group was superior to that of members the linear group insofar as perception of collaborative process, peer support, authorship, and collaborative result where concerned.     

Consistency Control for Synchronous and Asynchronous Collaboration Based on Shared Objects and Activities

We describe a new collaborative technology that bridges the gap between ad hoc collaboration in email and more formal collaboration in structured shared workspaces. Our approach is based on the notion of object-centric sharing, where users collaborate in a lightweight manner but aggregate and organize different types of shared artifacts into semi-structured activities with dynamic membership, hierarchical object relationships, as well as real-time and asynchronous collaboration. We present a working prototype that implements object-centric sharing on the basis of a replicated peer-to-peer architecture. In order to keep replicated data consistent in such a dynamic environment with blended synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, we designed appropriate consistency control algorithms, which we describe in detail. The performance of our approach is demonstrated by means of simulation results.     

Multi-level Editing of Hierarchical Documents

Collaborative editing enables a group of people to edit documents collaboratively over a computer network. Customisation of the collaborative environment to different subcommunities of users at different points in time is an important issue. The model of the document is an important factor in achieving customisation. We have chosen a tree representation encompassing a large class of documents, such as text, XML and graphical documents and here we propose a multi-level editing approach for maintaining consistency over hierarchical-based documents. The multi-level editing approach involves logging edit operations that refer to each node. Keeping operations associated with the tree nodes to which they refer offers support for tracking user activity performed on various units of the document. This facilitates the computation of awareness information and the handling of conflicting changes referring to units of the document. Moreover, increased efficiency is obtained compared to existing approaches that use a linear structure for representing documents. The multi-level editing approach involves the recursive application of any linear merging algorithm over the document structure and we show how the approach was applied for real-time and asynchronous modes of collaboration.     

Wiki-supported collaborative learning in primary education: How a dialogic space is created for thinking together

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki. Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study we claim that a dialogic perspective is needed to accomplish this. Students must develop an intersubjective orientation towards each others’ perspectives, to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, our project utilised a ‘Thinking Together’ approach to help students develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ to co-construct new understanding in a wiki science project. The students’ asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom—which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki—was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of CSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the Thinking Together approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students’ collaborative processes. We argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledge-construction era.     

Using an experimental study to develop group awareness support for real-time distributed collaborative writing

Supporting group awareness is vital for the success of real-time, distributed, collaborative writing systems. Many awareness mechanisms have been introduced, but highly effective solutions are few. The research presented in this paper focuses on the development of awareness mechanisms using an experimental study of synchronous distributed collaborative writing. Our study has made two major contributions to research on group awareness.First, the study compares the importance of different awareness elements in supporting group awareness for collaborative writing. The results of our Wilcoxon test on awareness elements identify the five most important elements, including “Being able to comment on what other users have done,” “Knowing what actions other users are currently taking,” “Providing a communication tool when audio is not available,” “Knowing other user's working areas in the document,” and “Knowing other user's tasks.”Second, the research proposes mechanisms corresponding to the above-mentioned five awareness elements. The mechanisms include Dynamic Task List (DTL), Modification Director (MD), Advanced Chat (AC) and Split Window View (SWV). These mechanisms provide support for various aspects of group awareness, and add many enhanced features to existing awareness mechanisms. For example, DTL presents high-level information about authors' responsibilities and the correlation between their work allocations. MD notifies users instantaneously whenever their work is modified by other authors. AC enhances communication between users by allowing them to attach document objects such as text and diagrams to a conversation message. And, SWV provides the views of other authors' working areas and viewing areas simultaneously.     

A trajectory-preserving synchronization method for collaborative visualization

In the past decade, a lot of research work has been conducted to support collaborative visualization among remote users over the networks, allowing them to visualize and manipulate shared data for problem solving. There are many applications of collaborative visualization, such as oceanography, meteorology and medical science. To facilitate user interaction, a critical system requirement for collaborative visualization is to ensure that remote users will perceive a synchronized view of the shared data. Failing this requirement, the user's ability in performing the desirable collaborative tasks will be affected. In this paper, we propose a synchronization method to support collaborative visualization. It considers how interaction with dynamic objects is perceived by application participants under the existence of network latency, and remedies the motion trajectory of the dynamic objects. It also handles the false positive and false negative collision detection problems. The new method is particularly well designed for handling content changes due to unpredictable user interventions or object collisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a number of experiments.     

Using shared representations to improve coordination and intent inference

In groupware, users must communicate about their intentions and aintain common knowledge via communication channels that are explicitly designed into the system. Depending upon the task, generic communication tools like chat or a shared whiteboard may not be sufficient to support effective coordination. We have previously reported on a methodology that helps the designer develop task specific communication tools, called coordinating representations, for groupware systems. Coordinating representations lend structure and persistence to coordinating information. We have shown that coordinating representations are readily adopted by a user population, reduce coordination errors, and improve performance in a domain task. As we show in this article, coordinating representations present a unique opportunity to acquire user information in collaborative, user-adapted systems. Because coordinating representations support the exchange of coordinating information, they offer a window onto task and coordination-specific knowledge that is shared by users. Because they add structure to communication, the information that passes through them can be easily exploited by adaptive technology. This approach provides a simple technique for acquiring user knowledge in collaborative, user-adapted systems. We document our application of this approach to an existing groupware system. Several empirical results are provided. First, we show how information that is made available by a coordinating representation can be used to infer user intentions. We also show how this information can be used to mine free text chat for intent information, and show that this information further enhances intent inference. Empirical data shows that an automatic plan generation component, which is driven by information from a coordinating representation, reduces coordination errors and cognitive effort for its users. Finally, our methodology is summarized, and we present a framework for comparing our approach to other strategies for user knowledge acquisition in adaptive systems.     

Enhancing and evaluating users’ social experience with a mobile phone guide applied to cultural heritage

We designed and built a mobile phone-based guidance system to support shared group experiences by suggesting the use of an eavesdropping metaphor inspired by Sotto Voce that allows visitors to eavesdrop on each other’s audio. Going beyond Sotto Voce, we create a shared experience by synchronizing the audio controls of all people who are eavesdropping on each other. Our contribution is the design of a mobile phone guide for cultural tours that combines a linear tour with in-depth information exploration, GPS-based maps offering group awareness, simple content customization and suggestions, and fluid movement between individual and ad-hoc group touring. The most important contribution is the design of a simple sharing scheme that gives all users in an ad hoc group implicit control over the audio content of everyone currently linked together. We evaluated our approach using data collected from participants, and our results validated the effectiveness and usefulness of our sharing scheme and interface for group experiences. In addition, we gained an understanding of how sharing information during visits to cultural heritage sites by socially related people influences the visiting experience; differing mutual eavesdropping and content control behaviors emerged according to group types (family vs. friends). By enabling groups to share their experience on-site, our system should increase the appeal of mobile phones as electronic tour guides, providing adequate support for shared group experiences.     

The Influence of workspace awareness on group intellective decision effectiveness

Workspace awareness is an understanding of members’ interactions within a shared workspace, and has been a fundamental concern to researchers examining how groups using group support systems can be more effective as they design and develop physical artifacts. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that workspace awareness can be a significant factor influencing the effectiveness of groups employing group support systems for the development of intangible artifacts, such as decision quality and consensus. The workspace awareness literature typically does not examine causal relationships within awareness. We develop a theoretical model that divides workspace awareness into three elements (presence, behavior, and insight awareness), which are important for group decision tasks, and provide empirical evidence that: (1) understanding the reasons behind group member behaviors (insight awareness) is key to increasing decision quality and consensus; (2) greater insight awareness can be obtained when an individual is better able to track and characterize others’ behaviors (behavior awareness); and (3) behavior awareness depends on an individual's ability to identify and distinguish among the different individuals within the group (presence awareness). Empirical support is derived from a laboratory experiment.     

Mutual engagement and collocation with shared representations

In this paper we explore the use of shared representations to support creative activities, focussing on collaborative music making. We examine the effect that user interface features of shared representations have on mutual engagement and show that providing shared awareness mechanisms increases mutual engagement. In particular, we show through an empirical study of 78 participants that providing cues to identity and shared pointers increases mutual engagement between participants, but together these features can overwhelm users. We also demonstrate that support for free-form annotation and spatial interaction with shared representations mediates interaction and helps participants to manage their collaborative activity effectively. In this paper we develop several measures mutual engagement and demonstrate their use to assess the design of shared representations. A key contribution of this paper is the development of a measure of collocation of participant interaction which indicates mutual engagement. The findings of the study have implications beyond the domain of collaborative music making and we outline some design guidelines for mutually engaging shared representations.     

Approximate resolution of asynchronous conflicts among sequential collaborations in dynamic virtual environments

Asynchronous collaboration for a networked virtual environment (NVE) has emerged as a promising area in collaborative computer‐aided design applications. The concept of asynchronous collaboration is a sequential collaboration of temporal processes in an NVE where the participants are not required to be present at the time of the collaboration. Conflicts in asynchronous collaboration occur because the preceding task of a participant can influence the output of the ensuing task of another participant. The conflicted tasks must be modified manually. However, it requires considerable time and effort to resolve conflicts in a sequential collaboration. In this paper, we present an asynchronous collaborative framework that converts the conflict states of the shared objects into approximately resolved states. We develop a novel approximate resolution algorithm using a task‐based modeling mechanism to resolve the asynchronous conflicts with their corresponding tasks. Moreover, we propose a visual relation editor for convenient management. The participants can set flexible relations among shared objects using the proposed visual editor. The proposed approximate resolution approach can significantly reduce the average resolution time and the number of required manual task resolutions in a virtual environment compared to a manual resolution approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Autonomy and Common Ground in Human-Robot Interaction: A Field Study

The use of robots, especially autonomous mobile robots, to support work is expected to increase over the next few decades. However, little empirical research examines how users form mental models of robots, how they collaborate with them, and what factors contribute to the success or failure of human-robot collaboration. A two-year observational study of a collaborative human-robot system suggests that the factors disrupting the creation of common ground for interactive communication change at different levels of robot autonomy. Our observations of users collaborating with the remote robot showed differences in how the users reached common ground with the robot in terms of an accurate, shared understanding of the robot's context, planning, and actions - a process called grounding. We focus on how the types and levels of robot autonomy affect grounding. We also examine the challenges a highly autonomous system presents to people's ability to maintain a shared mental model of the robot     

Collaborative Brushing and Linking for Co-located Visual Analytics of Document Collections

Many real-world analysis tasks can benefit from the combined efforts of a group of people. Past research has shown that to design visualizations for collaborative visual analytics tasks, we need to support both individual as well as joint analysis activities. We present Cambiera, a tabletop visual analytics tool that supports individual and collaborative information foraging activities in large text document collections. We define collaborative brushing and linking as an awareness mechanism that enables analysts to follow their own hypotheses during collaborative sessions while still remaining aware of the group's activities. With Cambiera, users are able to collaboratively search through documents, maintaining awareness of each others' work and building on each others' findings.     

Collaboration Support in Co-located Collaborative Systems for Users with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Systematic Literature Review

ABSTRACT

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) often display difficulty in social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication skills. They often have problems with recognizing and interpreting gestures and mental states of others, which restricts their capacity to understand implicit information essential to the social awareness and, consequently, the performance of collaborative activities in face-to-face situations (co-located collaboration). This study aims to identify, using a systematic literature review, how co-located collaborative systems designed for individuals with ASD provide the users with collaboration support mechanisms to encourage the performance of collaborative activities and interaction with their partners. Twenty-six studies from six electronic databases between the years 2006 and 2018 were selected and analyzed. Results evidenced the inclusion of different strategies to enforce or stimulate the collaboration among users, although there is a lack of resources for collaboration support as well as of studies designed specifically for individuals with severe ASD.     

Social group recommendation in the tourism domain

Recommender Systems learn users’ preferences and tastes in different domains to suggest potentially interesting items to users. Group Recommender Systems generate recommendations that intend to satisfy a group of users as a whole, instead of individual users. In this article, we present a social based approach for recommender systems in the tourism domain, which builds a group profile by analyzing not only users’ preferences, but also the social relationships between members of a group. This aspect is a hot research topic in the recommender systems area. In addition, to generate the individual and group recommendations our approach uses a hybrid technique that combines three well-known filtering techniques: collaborative, content-based and demographic filtering. In this way, the disadvantages of one technique are overcome by the others. Our approach was materialized in a recommender system named Hermes, which suggests tourist attractions to both individuals and groups of users. We have obtained promising results when comparing our approach with classic approaches to generate recommendations to individual users and groups. These results suggest that considering the type of users’ relationship to provide recommendations to groups leads to more accurate recommendations in the tourism domain. These findings can be helpful for recommender systems developers and for researchers in this area.     

Supporting collaborative sense-making in emergency management through geo-visualization

In emergency management, collaborative decision-making usually involves collaborative sense-making of diverse information by a group of experts from different knowledge domains, and needs better tools to analyze role-specific information, share and synthesize relevant information, and remain aware of the activities of others. This paper presents our research on the design of a collaborative sense-making system to support team work. We propose a multi-view, role-based design to help team members analyze geo-spatial information, share and integrate critical information, and monitor individual activities. Our design uses coordinated maps and activity visualization to aid decision-making as well as group activity awareness. The paper discusses design rationale, iterative design of visualization tools, prototype implementation, and system evaluation. Our work can potentially improve and extend collaborative tasks in emergency management.     

异构CAD系统协同框架与互操作

协同CAD通过网络支持不同地域的设计人员实时地完成产品设计或决策任务,以提高群体协同工作效率;异构CAD系统协同将分布的不同的CAD系统,如ProE、UG、SolidWork等业界比较成熟且是主流的商业CAD系统,集成在一个框架平台下,从而支持人们更方便地协同工作;文章讨论了异构CAD系统协同的体系结构与共享感知问题,提出了一个支持共享感知的复制式系统结构模型;进一步将现有商业CAD系统引入到该模型中,给出了一个基于构件的协同CAD中间件框架模型,讨论了中间件接口和CAD系统的互操作。     

Augmenting Multi-Party Face-to-Face Interactions Amongst Strangers with User Generated Content

We present the results of an investigation into the role of curated representations of self, which we term Digital Selfs, in augmented multi-party face-to-face interactions. Advancements in wearable technologies (such as Head-Mounted Displays) have renewed interest in augmenting face-to-face interaction with digital content. However, existing work focuses on algorithmic matching between users, based on data-mining shared interests from individuals’ social media accounts, which can cause information that might be inappropriate or irrelevant to be disclosed to others. An alternative approach is to allow users to manually curate the digital augmentation they wish to present to others, allowing users to present those aspects of self that are most important to them and avoid undesired disclosure. Through interviews, video analysis, questionnaires and device logging, of 23 participants in 6 multi-party gatherings where individuals were allowed to freely mix, we identified how users created Digital Selfs from media largely outside existing social media accounts, and how Digital Selfs presented through HMDs were employed in multi-party interactions, playing key roles in facilitating strangers to interact with each other. We present guidance for the design of future multi-party digital augmentations in collaborative scenarios.     

Using a file history graph to keep track of personal resources across devices and services

Personal digital resources now tend to be stored, managed and shared using a variety of devices and online services. As a result, different versions of resources are often stored in different places, and it has become increasingly difficult for users to keep track of them. We introduce the concept of a file history graph that can be used to provide users with a global view of resource provenance and enable them to track specific versions across devices and services. We describe how this has been used to realise a version-aware environment, called Memsy, and report on a lab study used to evaluate the proposed workflow. We also describe how reconciliation services can be used to fill in missing links in the file history graph and present a detailed study for the case of images as a proof of concept.     

Collaborative knowledge building with shared video representations

Online video has become established as a fundamental part of the fabric of the web; widely used by people for information sharing, learning and entertainment. We report results from a design study that explored how people interact to create shared multi-path video representations in a social video environment. The participants created multiple versions of a video by providing alternative and interchangeable scenes that formed different paths through the video content. This multi-path video approach was designed to circumvent limitations of traditionally linear video for use as a shared representation in collaborative knowledge building activities. The article describes how people created video resources in collaborative activities in two different settings. We discuss different modes of working that were observed and outline the specific challenges of using the video medium as shared representation. Finally we demonstrate how an analysis of collaborative dimensions of the shared multi-path video representation can be applied to discuss the design space and to raise the discourse about the usefulness of these representations in knowledge building environments.